My goal with this analysis is to find out whether Brazilian deputies have been using their reimbursement rights inadequately.

These reimbursements are called Quota for the Exercise of Parliamentary Activity and are “[a quota] destined to pay for expenses exclusively linked to the execise of parliamentary activity”. Therefore, as far as I could tell, there are two main ways we could detect an improper claim for reimbursement (given the available data): * If the refund category is suspicious * If the time component of the refund is suspicious

Dissemination of Parliamentary Activity

To investigate suspicious refund categories I tried plotting a bar chart of total refunds per category. Much to my surprise, I had already found something very weird.

# Plot total value of refunds
desc_summ %>%
  plot_ly(
    x = ~refund_description,
    y = ~refund_tot,
    type = "bar",
    color = ~refund_description
  ) %>%
  layout(
    legend = list(orientation = 'h'),
    xaxis = list(
      showticklabels = FALSE,
      title = ""
    )
  )

Apparently “dissemination of parliamentary activity” is the category that has had the highest overall cost for the taxpayer: a total of R$48,645,429.54. Since this refund description is very vague, it seems to me that it is being widely used by the deputies as a cover up for improper refunds.

Just to make sure I wasn’t being too quick to judge, I decided to look into this a little further and ceated a box-plot for each category.

# Plot refund descriptions
deputies %>%
  plot_ly(
    x = ~refund_description,
    y = ~refund_value,
    type = "box",
    color = ~refund_description
  ) %>%
  layout(
    legend = list(orientation = 'h'),
    xaxis = list(
      showticklabels = FALSE,
      title = ""
    )
  )

In the image above dissemination of parliamentary activity doesn’t have the highest median, but it’s outliers stand out from the rest. If we examine to top outlier of this category (and of the whole plot), we find that it corresponds to R$184,500.00 being reimbursed for expenses at a small print shop, corroborating to the hypothesis that this category is in fact being misused by the deputies.